Category: Books

I picked up this book last year Sparta (home of the Trojans) because I had some room in the bag-for-three-bucks and I’ve been working some Westerns into the rotation. I read this book in between chapters of Perelandra, the Venus book of C.S. Lewis’s Space trilogy, and I am likely to cull the stack of books on the chairside table because I’m finding that I’m reading more and more of these enjoyable little in-between-chapter books rather than the others, and I do want to make quota this year.

So: Apparently, this is the third(?) book in a series, and it rehashes a bit of the previous business in spots. A small town is growing due to the influence and spending of a rough rancher and his collection of hired hands, and they turn to a retired lawman who had previously taken care of another badman in town. He brings his tough but genteel wife along, and he hires a deputy barman who is black to help him clean up the town and to serve a warrant for the murder of a mentally disabled man in a put-up shootout.

The text of this 25(!)-year-old book moves along pretty well. It has some sex scenes in it which are not as explicit as a Gunsmith book, but definitely describes what goes where in a manner you would not find in Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour. It spends some time with the setup, but ultimately devolves into a couple of set pieces and questionable decisions that lead to a dramatic staged climax. I mean, not a bad book, but it’s light popcorn reading and nothing more.

Also, I must comment that the main character plus black sidekick staying at the Boston made me wonder if it’s supposed to be a holla to Spenser and Hawk. Dunno.

So if I find any more of this writer on bag day at the Christian County book sales, I won’t avoid them. At the Springfield-Greene County book sale (running now), I won’t make it to the Westerns section, so I won’t be seeking them out. As it stands, I have enough backlogged Westerns for the pace at which I read them, even as I am reading them more frequently these days.

I just picked this book up a couple weeks ago at Hooked on Books, and I brought it up to my bedroom to be the book of poetry I read before bed. Actually, I already had one of those, Pindar’s odes, but I wanted something a little lighter in case I did not want to read six pages of poorly footnoted 2500-year-old name-checks. So now my upstairs dresser, the one by the chair under the lamp, not the book accumulation point dresser, often has two books of poetry on it: The book I’m reading, and the book that I’m reading because the book I’m reading is kinda long and I’ve run out of steam on it momentarily. (The chairside book accumulation point has this progression nested deeply, where I’m reading a western and a business self-help book because I lost momentum on The Space Trilogy because I lost steam on the second book of The Story of Civilization which was to be a little light reading while I await the urge to continue with Pamela–and I think there are a couple of other long-suffering books in there.)

At any rate, this is a gift book circa 1980. Something you’d give to a friend, or something that your great-grandmother would give to a friend. Idealsesque with illustrations, paragraphs of prose, and a mix of poetry from then-contemporary light poets and some of the heavy weights from the classics. I mean, it’s a nice book, a nice bit to read a couple of poems from before bed. And I cannot help but contrast it with the gift books that would come within the decade, where paperbacks took over and got smaller and cutesy.

These books are catnip to me, which is why I pick them up when they’re on the buck cart or sight unseen in bundles at the library book sale. And any Ideals magazines themselves that I can spot in the wild, which is not that many these days and in southwest Missouri.

I got this book a week ago Saturday at ABC Books, where it was the entirety of the martial arts section (wow, has it been over a year since I was last at ABC Books? That cannot be right, but it might–it has been a while–no, I got the latest Wilder book around Christmastime, but apparently did not note it with a Good Book Hunting post). And I jumped right into it.

So: This is a bit of an apologetic that says you can be a Christian and do martial arts. It starts by saying that thirty years ago (which is not forty-five years ago) that a number of people thought that maybe the martial arts were a gateway to Zen Buddhism or Taoism–as a matter of fact, one of the other students at the seminary with the author reported him to the dean for being a martial artist.

The book starts out by defining a martial art, which then leads to the inclusion of Greco-Roman wrestling, boxing, and other non-eastern Asian forms. It offers a high level history of the development of martial arts in China, Japan, and Korea. It also goes into Biblical passages which encourage Christians to be able to defend themselves.

All in all, it’s a pretty good book that makes a compelling case for defending martial arts from being demonic, or at least not being a bad influence. I would have thought that this issue was well-settled before the 21st century, but I guess some dojos and schools might still have a Zen element to them. Mine is taught by a seventh degree black belt (three gold stripes fewer than the author) who is an active member of his church. So perhaps this book relitigated the past a little.

But it does make one (me) reconsider how much I defend, or at least understand, the perspective of some Christians who remind everyone that yoga comes from a Hindu background (see this and this).

As a matter of fact, a friend reposted a similarly themed post just last week:

So although the martial arts are the devil! cultural battle has been won, the yoga one rages on.

Oh, and as a scholarly book, it has a number of references and end notes. And one of them is to Zen in the Martial Arts which I read in 2022. More of a popular book than a scholarly work, but I’m starting to see some cross-referencing in my martial arts reading. Ain’t I smart? Maybe I should drag my carcass to a martial arts class and prove that it’s not so.

I just picked this book up last weekend, and after finishing I’ve Seen It All In The Library, I had a bit of time before retiring for the evening, so I took the opportunity to browse this little gifter.

It’s basically a panel from Peanuts cartoons with the opposite page exhorting you to Be something good. Be dependible. Be endearing. Be polite. Be helpful. And so on.

So I browsed it. I don’t think it helped me to be any more of any of the adjectives depicted than I was already. But I was not the target audience for the book, which I presume was Peanuts fans who got the book as a gift from someone who couldn’t think of anything else to give. I have to wonder if both of those target audiences are dwindling: Both Peanuts fans and people who give or receive books for Christmas.

At any rate, I counted it in my annual total, of course. Which was the goal. Normally, I’d fill the gap with poetry, but I’ve got a book of fairly tedious grandma poetry by the chair and two books for right-before-bed reading upstairs, and I did not want to stack another book on the chairside table.

I got this remaindered library book at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale in 2021, which would have meant that its presence in the library system was only five years and change. Is that a lot? I don’t have a lot of insight into the circulation policies and average item duration in libraries even though I worked for a library software company back in the day and even though I’ve read this book.

I bought it, thinking it might be akin to some of the book collector or book dealer books I’ve read and accumulated over the years (see also Slightly Chipped, Warmly Inscribed, Books: A Memoir, A Pound of Paper, etc.). But, no. This is more of an autobiography of the author’s career as a librarian. The amount of “all” that he has seen is secondary.

I mean, I don’t want to slag on the book too much since it was obviously a labor of love, but although the guy makes sure to tell us that he was reading at the sixth grade level in kindergarten, I don’t get the sense that he likes books all that much. The book is shot through with movie and television show references, but not many book ones–and those sound like they come from his college classes in library science more than the Great Books. I mean, when he describes someone’s beard, he mentions nicknaming the fellow Dumbledore because the Harry Potter movies had come out. And some of the things he breezes over–the first chapter on library history, says, “The Chou Dynasty gave way to the Ch’in Dynasty of 221BC and they took a slightly differing view of learning and reading.” Which is true in the second part of the compound sentence, but kind of elides over the Warring States Period which was about 250 years. A blink in history (especially Chinese history), but, c’mon, man. Maybe I’m just well-read and seeking to quibble.

But, yeah, the kinda disjointed book talks about his youth and falling into a library job in college; the history of libraries summarized from his textbooks; the story of moving the library from one location to another while the library building underwent renovation; some anecdotes about working in the library; a couple of fiction/drama pieces the author wrote; and his getting a job in a supervisory position with another library. It did bring forward to mind the enormous undertaking that it was to switch over from the cards-in-pockets circulation system to the computers-and-barcodes system. Tagging the library holdings in a quick fashion must have been crazy. Not only did I work for a library software company, but prior to that, I spitballed with a friend about building a suite to do that for used bookstores, including having a team of people who would come in and catalog/apply barcodes to the stock overnight or over a weekend. That would have been quite an endeavor for a larger bookstore.

So the book was not especially compelling. It could have been improved with more discrete anecdotes. The writing was passable, but only that. And the cover is not actually the author; it’s made from iStock clip art. I dunno why, but that disappointed me. And although I have checked the local library’s job site from time to time as I contemplate my retirement unemployability in IT as an old man, I have to wonder if I would really like it that much since my experience and this book indicate librarians are more into being librarians and government employees/bureaucrats and not so much people who love books. And the patrons are not people who love books either. Maybe bookstores and especially used bookstores are the direction I would enjoy more.

Sometime on or after seeing my aunt Mary on a recent trip to Wisconsin (How recent? Ten years ago), I learned that she spent time in India as a girl (her parents were missionaries?). I thought that was interesting, and I did some Internet stalking (I’m not close enough to most of my paternal family to, you know, just ask about it), and I spotted this book on Amazon and ordered it (in 2019). So it’s been sitting on my to-read shelves for six years for a moment just like this, where I would be still trying to work up the gumption to jump back into the C.S. Lewis Space trilogy.

I was not sure whether this book was by my aunt or not. The Amazon page for it is not helpful. My aunt and other family members never mentioned it. And as I got into it, I realized: No. Not my aunt, so not a close relation but probably somewhere in the distant chain (probably not as close as my rich cousin who died).

So: This book is a story of her faith journey told through journal entries and connective writing. Ms. Noggle had a tough life. She was orphaned early, raised by a grandmother until the grandmother, too, died when Ms. Noggle was fifteen. She was raped by a carnie in her youth. Her brother died in Vietnam. She had a lot of distrust and anger in her, but she eventually found her way back to (the Catholic) church. But even though she started going to church and praying in her 20s, she still had ups and downs in her relationship with God (and Jesus), especially when her close sister dies in the 1980s from breast cancer.

It would be oversimple to say that the book is but a litany of hardships interleavened with letters (to God, to therapists), journal entries, and prayers, although that is the basic structure of it. But it’s a strangely compelling account, a testament and testimony, about the ups and downs of faith in hard times. And even with the ups and downs, she makes progress to a better and stronger faith through the book. I expected her to become a nun at the end of the book, but that wasn’t the case.

The self-published book is 208 pages, but the text is double-spaced throughout and prayers and letters are indented, so it’s really far shorter than that. A quick read and inspirational in its way.

But, yeah, not my aunt.

I mentioned that I was reading a book by Yogi Berra, and not one I’d read before (well, I searched my blog, and I’ve only read When You Come To A Fork In The Road, Take It and The Yogi Book). I liked them well enough that I bought this book at ABC Books in 2023 for $5.95. Baseball books are right above the martial arts section (when ABC Books even has a martial arts section–it sells out quickly even when I’m not buying them all).

Both of those books came out a decade later than this book, which came out when Berra was still coaching (not managing) the Houston Astros or shortly thereafter, which means parts of the book might have been written whilst he was still coaching and parts after. Still, it does impact the scope and flavor of the book, which is almost an oral history from Berra about his years playing (almost 19) and managing/coaching (almost 25 after his playing days). So it reads a little as a transcription of a stream of consciousness with history and life lessons kinda bound up and then grouped into chapters which have topical titles that are only tangentally related to what Yogi talks about in each. And the chapters are broken by “Other Voices” which is, again, fairly unstructured reminisciences about Berra by other baseball people–with, sometimes, as much stage information about where the reminisciencer was when talking to the unnamed interviewer (Tom Horton, probably) or how difficult it was for the interviewer to get a couple quotes about Berra from the other figure. Berra repeats a couple of bits/facts and drops the name Milton Friedman because he had dinner with him once (which is recounted at the beginning of the “Milton Friedman” chapter)–apparently he was very proud of their conversation. Was that the mythical parenthetical with parentheses followed by a parenthetical with an em-dash? You betcha! Bask in it, gentle reader. Bask in it.

So: This is a mid book in his career. He had a couple in the early 1960s as his playing days were winding down. This book as his coaching/managing days were winding down. And then around the turn of the century and beyond, his later books which are more enjoyable as they’re structured better.

If I see the other books in the wild, I’ll pick them up. Because he was an interesting figure: A native St. Louisian, a participant of the D-Day invasion at Normandy, a winning ball player, a winning coach, and a public figure who was probably misunderestimated for much of it (but appreciated as a scamp in his dotage).

Not long after we saw Herb Alpert in concert last month, I asked my beautiful wife what trumpeter living or dead she would like to see or have seen in concert (Wynton Marsalis was her answer, and as he’s still touring with the Jazz at the Lincoln Center Orchestra, we might have the chance to see him sometime–preferably if they bring Ashley Pezzotti along as a vocalist–oh, and my answer to the question is Maynard Ferguson). So as I read this book, I asked her what baseball players she has met or would like to meet. She hasn’t met a baseball player although she was quite the Tigers fan in the early 1980s. I think the only one I’ve seen in person officially was Pete Vukovich, the Brewers pitcher, who has at a table at some convention I attended in my college years (although we did see Willie McGee at the box office of a movie theater once, but we didn’t bother him as he was trying to pick a film to watch). She really didn’t have an answer to someone she would like to see or meet, and I guess my choice would be either Berra or Ozzie Smith (who’s still around, so you never know).

At any rate, I will definitely keep my eye out for the Berra books I am missing, although I bet it will be hard to find the early books in the wild without ordering them. And is it so weird that I think I can hear his voice? Or maybe I’m hearing George Burns voice and thinking it was Yogi Berra.

No, it’s his voice. Probably cemented by the AFLAC commercials.

I picked up this book in a bundle of chapbooks in April 2024. These little chapbooks, especially the non-poetry ones, have to fit in a certain place in my reading schedule: Mostly, when I finish a book with a couple of hours before bed and when I don’t want to dive back into the growing stack of my incompletely read books beside the chair. As it happens, this week I had just such an opening after finishing National Lampoon’s Jokes Jokes Jokes.

This story–it is a short story in a single volume, saddle-stitched–originally appeared in The New England Magazine in January 1892. The fact that it has been reprinted in 2018 indicates that it has some value to professors somewhere, and apparently, according to my research (reading Wikipedia) indicates it’s “is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature for its illustration of the attitudes towards the mental and physical health of women in the 19th century. It is also lauded as an excellent work of horror fiction.”

Re-eee-ally.

I mean, it is a horror story: A doctor takes his wife to a quiet home for three months because she’s exhibiting some, I dunno, depression, and she’s in a big old house with him and someone to help, and she stays in a large room on the top floor that looks kind of like a nursery but with some scarring and damage. The room has the eponymous yellow wallpaper, which disturbs the woman further. Although they tell her she’s doing better, she feels more lethargic as the story goes on, and she starts seeing people in the gardens below and a woman trapped in the wallpaper, and as they are readying to depart, she embraces her madness.

There you go: Embracing madness as female empowerment.

My research (reading Wikipedia) indicates that this story might be a little autobiographical (presumably without the embracing madness part), and that the author was speaking against “The Rest Cure” which I guess what they did when well-to-do women in the late 19th century showed some of the less florid mental illnesses (meloncholy, lethargy, and so on). So the author was probably dinging something near to her heart and very contemporary, and somehow that has spoken to over a hundred years’ worth of feminists.

Not a half bad period horror piece. Not as almost inaccessible as Lovecraft. More akin to Poe. Or Algernon Blackwood (whose collection I abandoned and will likely not pick up again). So if you’re into that sort of thing, I guess this is a book for you. Or source material for a college paper on women’s mental health in literature or something.

I guess you can expect to see me find other books that “fall into” this evening reading gap as I’m only at 54 books for the year, and it’s almost September.

I bought this book this spring, which meant it was piled high on my existing office bookshelves until I put it on the single unread shelf on my new office bookshelf. And when it comes to dodge reading the increasing pile of meh or long (and sometimes meh) books beside my reading chair, I have recently turned to this shelf for my next book since it’s right there and it’s not an overwhelming selection.

At any rate, you might recall, gentle reader, that I’m a sucker for National Lampoon-badged movies such as Dirty Movie, Adam and Eve, and Holiday Reunion, and Black Ball (some more than others). I might have had a subscription to the magazine in the late 1980s, but I was less impressed with it.

This, though, was a bit of a breath of fresh air.

It’s grouped by the, what, butt of the jokes? Women, Men, Cats, various nationalities, and so on. It’s got its share of dirty jokes, Dirty Johnny jokes, and things that play upon old stereotypes (but are funny if you replace Polack with Cletus–as a matter of fact, one of the longer chapters is Rednecks). And, to emphasize their versatility, a couple of jokes are actually repeated in different chapters with the nouns changed.

Basically, it’s Dirty Movie in its original form.

Not all of the jokes are dirty or offensive; several of my favorite talking dog jokes make an appearance (and I’ve seen them in Readers Digest as well). But for the most part, not something you’re going to drop into your speech in the 21st century, even if you’re speaking to a Fraternal Order Of of some sort.

So I was amused with it in places and had a couple of chuckles. Because I’m probably every ist in the book except resist, and I grew up on The Official Frank O. Pinion Dirty Joke Book, Blazing Saddles, and my own father’s crude at times sense of humor. So I was not offended. Your mileage may vary. But if you are offended, you’re probably not the type to be reading books anyway.

The back matter of the book lists a large number of National Lampoon Books titles, which I will pick up if I can. And the very last page is a promo for a movie coming out in 2007: National Lampoon’s Bagboy. Bloody heck, I might have to order that.

How timely is this book even today? After I wrote up this post, Baldilocks shared one of the jokes from the Asians chapter on Facebook:

When I bought this book in 2018, I mentioned that my beautiful wife loved the books. To prove her point, she recently re-read this book (not this copy, which is mine, but her copy which is a well-re-read hardback). So when I was looking for another “short” book to read in between chapters of C.S. Lewis’s Perelandria (which has been very, very slow to start), I settled upon this paperback which has images from the Matt Damon movie on the cover. Judging by the uncracked binding, this book was not read and re-read by its original owner. I also mentioned when I bought the book that I had listened to one of the original books on audiocassettes back when I was commuting a lot to Columbia, Missouri, and back. But I was not familiar with the way the book began, so I think it might have been The Bourne Supremacy.

So: Well, this certainly is the longest Executioner book I’ve ever read.

This is the first of the Bourne series, and it starts with an unnamed man get thrown into the Mediterranean Sea just before a boat explodes. He is recovered by fishermen and is nursed back to health by an alcoholic doctor. But he has amnesia and does not know who he is. The doctor finds a piece of microfilm on him that gives him a way to access money from a Swiss bank. When he’s feeling well enough, he goes to Zurich to claim the money and finds that some people want to kill him. He hooks up with a Canadian economist who helps him, and his memory comes back in plot-helpful fits and starts. He might be a killer named Cain! He might be Carlos, the most notorious assassin in Europe! He might not even be named Jason Bourne! Set pieces, he plays cat and mouse with Carlos’s employees, and then suddenly a black ops organization in the United States government wants to pull him in, and the book pivots to him running from them, and….

Well, meh.

I mean, it’s awful damn wordy. We get pages of different players talking to each other to lay out plot points or to speculate on plot point to somehow build tension through gasbaggery. I complained about the same thing in Shōgun. And then we get the protagonist wigging out when memories and sensations coming flooding back. A bit overused and overdramatic.

I mean, it’s a long book, but the writing is not especially deep with description or characterization, although modern thrillers I’ve read like Lee Child tend to be thicker writing but not any more real depth to it, just words. Somewhere there’s a sweet spot, and I probably don’t write that way myself. Probably because the same voice critical of these books is critical of my writing while I’m writing. “How’s that next novel coming?” you might ask. It is not, thanks.

But I read one of my mother-in-law’s favorite books this year (A Tale of Two Cities), and I slagged on it. Now I’m slagging on one of my wife’s favorite books. Maybe I just don’t have anything nice to say about anything. But that’s what bloggers are, ainna?

This is a relatively recent (2020) hardback from the Salesian Missions collection of poems which I just bought in (May 2025, so just three months ago). Since I’ve gotten through my stack of Poetry magazines (and, finally, the complete works of Keats), I brought it up into the bedroom for the poetry nightcap.

And, gentle reader, you know I like Ideals magazine, and that’s what you’re getting in a collection like this. Poetry about seasons and about the relationship with God–moreso in this collection, as it’s produced by a Catholic organization as a fundraiser–but I get that in the grandma poetry chapbooks I also accumulate. These collections and Ideals are generally a cut above the self-published chapbooks (my own included?). It seems we get some overlap between the two, poets whose work appears in both (Grace E. Easley? Steven Michael Schumacher?)–but maybe I just read enough of these little collections that the names are just familiar only from Salesian publications.

So I enjoyed it as a light bit of a snack before bed, a ritual that winds me down for sleep.

The back flap had a long list of 128-page collections like this and regularly published pocket-sized books which I thought might be a checklist I could use to see how well my collection is going. But it might not be a comprehensive list–books I have reported on from the 20th century do not appear to be represented. Is it possible that they’ve published so many this century that they didn’t even have room for decades’ worth from last century? I guess someone knows, but not me.

At any rate, I recommend them. Perhaps I should send them some money as well to get the freshest works. It’s odd; subscribing to First Things and The New Oxford Review and, briefly, Touchstone have gotten me onto a lot of Catholic mailing lists, but not Salesian Missions.

It seems like I just read a Hornblower or O’Brian book, but I might have been thinking of Sharpe’s Trafalgar which mostly took place at sea and which I just read in January 2024. The last Hornblower title I read was Beat to Quarters in 2017, although I did pick up two last year: Lieutenant Hornblower at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale in April and this book at the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale in June. So maybe that makes for why it seems fresh; after your first half century, anything in the last decade is just.

This posthumous collection is not actually a full novel; it has the incomplete novel Forester was working on when he passed away and two short stories in it. In Hornblower and the Crisis, Hornblower is between ships and helps to seize a French ship that spotted and pursued the little hoy he was taking back to port from the Hotspur, his previous command. He manages to capture the captain’s papers and return them to London, including an official dispatch from Boney, who has just made himself emperor. When conferring with the Lordships, he blurts out a plan to deliver forged orders for the French fleet to sail out, and they put him on the mission since he has some experience with the land area in which the operation will need to be conducted. And as he is about to become a spy, Forester dies, so we get a summary of the notes left behind. “Hornblower and the Widow McCool” explains how an Irish rebel is captured amongst French forces, and he asks Hornblower to deliver his sea chest to his widow. Hornblower suspects something is up and discovers the secret of the rebel’s last poem for his wife. “The Last Encounter” tells the story of an elderly Hornblower at his estate when a seeming madman arrives, thinking he’s Bonaparte. He is about to dismiss him when his wife (a different wife than in Hornblower and the Crisis, I note) intercedes and helps him on his way; later, they receive a thank-you note from Louis Napoleon Bonaparte who has established himself as ruler of France.

This 158 page Penguin book was a far quicker read than Shōgun for sure (but both historical paperbacks set but about two hundred years or so apart). It’s too big for the new mass market paperback shelf in my office which I have the inclination to fill by reading a bunch of paperbacks. But not big paperbacks like this.

Also, I did flag something in “The Last Encounter”:

The stranger made a low bow, and advancing, took Barbara’s hand and stooped low over it again to kiss it. Barbara was woman enough to be susceptible to a kise on the hand–and any rascal could find his way into her good graces if he could perform that outlandish ceremony in the right way.

Time for a Coffee House Memory^TM:

In 1996 or thereabouts, I remember a trio of Austrian au pairs (although the Germans and their cousins might have their own word for it, as au pair is clearly French and hence the enemy (at least in the context of this book–in modern times, the French are not even French)). A blonde and two brunettes; I can only remember the name of Marlena, which was one of the two brunettes and not even the one I thought was prettiest. They showed up at the Grind late at night, probably after the children they were responsible were in bed, and they drank coffee until some of the other expats (Indian or Pakistani, back when that was still a bit exotic) would invite them to go to the clubs, most likely Velvet (see also The Various Clubs I Have Attended from 2019), and they would dance and whatnot and somehow be up to take care of their charges in the morning. We were all young then and could do stuff like that–it was before my print shop days, when I was still working retail and might not have had to work until afternoons sometimes. I do remember that months later that the brunette whom I thought to be the prettiest was looking a little ragged.

At any rate, on the night that my friend Scott (he’s still alive, which puts him far ahead of many of my friends from the middle 1990s) introduced me to the three, I bowed and kissed their hands in turn. The blonde was quite miffed about it and recoiled whilst I did it, and throughout the evening, I understand she kept returning it and asking Scott why I did it.

Clearly, I did not perform that outlandish ceremony the right way.

So, back to the book. More to my taste than O’Brian and even Cornwell when you get down to it because the language is punchier and although it does talk about elements of naval warfare and operation, it does not go to the distance where you think that the author just wants to show off his research.

So I’m hoping I can find Lieutenant Hornblower sometime in the near future. And when you get past your first half century, you’re comfortable that “near future” might be nine years from now (should I live that long–most of my matrilineal side did not).

As I mentioned when I bought this book in April 2023, I might be the biggest collector of Leah Lathrom Wallace in the country since I have now read both The Best of Wheat and a Little Chaff and this second volume.

So I picked this up for my upstairs poetry book. I’ve taken to reading a little poetry right before bed every night as part of my wind-down ritual. For some months, I made my way through the stack of Poetry magazines that I bought last October.

And, you know what? I prefer the grandmother poetry in this volume. It’s got rhythm, and it’s got rhyme. Its contents are about trusting in God and home considerations–including some poems for friends and family members and personal history. Actually, this volume has a number of poems by family members, which reinforces the fact that everyone with the better education system of the early 20th century wrote poems (see my own father’s poem here).

So it was a quick read, relatable (more so than modern message poetry which is about speaking the poet’s truth and not shared humanity, so the reader might be excluded from the truth at all), and it helped me wind down.

Given that the back part of the book is relative’s poetry to fill this chapbook out, I have to assume that I now own the whole set. I’ll find other works like it, though; the poetry tables at the book sales are still full of these little chapbooks by somebody’s grandma. And I’ll pick them up and get to them eventually. And, eventually, they will disappear from the poetry tables, replaced by Print on Demand works by contemporary poets. If anything at all. Ai, I am leading to a dark and depressing meta-conclusion even though this particular book was anything but.

After I read the first of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet), I thought I would pick up something short as a palate-cleanser. Brother, did I go wrong: This 1200+ page book, which I just bought in June (not long before I started reading it), took the better part of a month to read.

This particular volume is the tie-in to the original television miniseries and has a picture of Richard Chamberlain on the back (what, he was more than Allan Quatermain?). As you might know, gentle reader, a new miniseries was released last year, so strangely enough, if I get down verbally with the kids these days about Shōgun these days, they’ll know it from the recent television experience, whereas I read the doorstop book (see also Dune).

So:

An English pilot/navigator is aboard a ship, the Erasmus, the only remaining vessel from a small contingent set to circumnavigate the globe circa 1600 is shipwrecked on the coast of Japan with a small number of his crew. They’re captured and are going to be killed, but the local warlord, Toranaga, takes an interest in him. He, Blackthorne, the pilot, is called Anjin-san (“Anjin” is nihongo for pilot). He falls in love with a married woman, Mariko, vows revenge on a brutal samurai (that’s redundant, but Yabu is extra brutal and does not like Blackthorne), and, after saving the life of Toranaga (twice) is made hatamoto and samurai. Meanwhile, above and beyond all this, the last military leader died, leaving a council of regents. A rival on the council, Ishido, is maneuvering to ostracize/expel Toranaga. And the Jesuits have started making inroads into Japan, converting a number of people, including some provincial leaders, but they think Blackthorne, as an Englishman and Protestant, is a heretic and must be eliminated. So we’ve got a bit of a fish-out-of-water story as Blackthorne comes to appreciate the Japanese way of life–or elements thereof; a love story between Blackthorne and Mariko; and a hella lotta political intrigue. And it has 1200 pages in which to do it.

The narrative has an interesting bit of flashbackery to it; often, we get an action or situation, and then the story flashes back to the events leading up to the action or situation. Which turns out to be almost how the whole story is laid out (spoiler alert?) We do get some chatty spots where characters discuss events or situations for a couple of pages to set up context or intrigue, and these spots are a bit boggy. And although he is the Western readers’ intro into the story and the one we’re supposed to root for, ultimately, at the end, Blackthorne’s real importance kind of falls off (the book is not entitled An Englishman in Japan or Anjin-San). And the climax comes around page 1000, runs a relatively long time, and then we have a bit of a dénouement for over one hundred pages with an ending that leads not to the great battle between the rivals for the shogunate–the book ends with preparations for the war. So a bit underwhelming to a modernish reader who expects more of a payoff at the end.

So it’s very similar to The Last Samurai, although set at opposite ends of the shogunate: A Western Larry Sue comes to Japan and ends up at the domicile of a samurai, falls in love with a Japanese woman with complications, and comes to appreciate the samurai way of life. Both are a bit hagiographic on the samurai way of life with living in the moment and composing poems and whatnot, but this book does show its inherent brutality and disdain for peasants, merchants, and Christians whereas the film did not (as I have not seen either filmed rendition of this book, I cannot say how brutal they were depicted, although the Wikipedia entry for the 1980 miniseries indicates it broke many network television taboos).

At any rate, I felt a little smart reading it as I was already familiar with some of Japan’s history, Buddhism (c’mon, I know who the Amida Buddha is), and geography, but at times I was a little annoyed with the exposition until I realized that most people were not.

It’s a long book. And I definitely finished it. But I’m not eager to run out and gather Clavell’s other work.

Although I did make an allusion to the film The Fly while reading this book, and in looking into Clavell’s career (reading Wikipedia), I discovered he wrote the screenplay for the original 1958 film. So, clearly, the books published in 1980 are listening to me. Be careful! Think and say nothing!